Section 1 - The Basics of EDM

We’ll start with the basics of EDM.

Why did we need to develop yet another metadata standard? What ideas are behind it? How is it structured - and what's the bare minimum of data that we need to publish your content on Europeana Collections?

We’ll take a little detour to explain what Linked Open Data (LOD) is all about. Because EDM is built upon the LOD philosophy, understanding LOD will clarify why EDM was built the way it was.

Background reading: An example of how the cultural heritage community is using LOD

We discuss the history of EDM: how it was developed and how it implements LOD concepts. We also look into the cornerstones for the design of EDM, e.g. a cross-domain approach; re-use of elements of existing data models.

We’ll look at EDM's three core classes and five contextual classes and which classes are mandatory if you want Europeana to publish your collections. Of course, it would be great if you can provide richer data than the minimum required, we'll come back to that later.